By: Kelsey Klimara I could probably reflect on my trip to Auschwitz for days and still have more to say. I could also have spent more than a few days at the camp and still had more to see. Although six hours seemed like more than enough at the time, I don’t think that we […]
By: Madeline Diorio It is like an old story heard throughout childhood from older generations and textbooks so thick one might wonder if they will ever be able to grasp the concepts inside of them. We all know of the Holocaust, of the genocide of the Jews, and of Hitler and the Nazis. We all […]
By: Kara McGrane When visiting city after city, museum after museum, memorial after memorial, it can be easy to forget the importance of what is being remembered; but, that is not always the case when those cities, museums, and memorials forget a part of their own past that is so crucial to their memory and […]
By Megan Newell Our two and a half week travel seminar through Lithuania and eastern Poland brought to light the importance of dialogue, art and nature as means of reconciling with the past and cultivating awareness for the future. The use of such universal, but also quite rudimentary, medians like art and nature help to […]
By: Jacob Steckel It is a strange phenomenon that, when facing the past, even those who did not experience events can be marked by them. Especially in the twentieth century, we who study human history and its consequences encounter ferocity, the likes of which are found neither in nature nor in reason. When Edward Gibbon […]
By: Page Garbee Dilapidation consumes the town of Krynki. A small town lying near the Belarusian border in Poland, it once had a strong and important place in World War II and Jewish history. What remains of that history today is little more than a few piles of rocks and some boarded up buildings. At […]
By: Kevin Kuzniczci From the time I had appeared at the international airport in Vilnius, Lithuania to the first minute our group presented ourselves at our hostel in Warsaw, we gained significant insight to the lessons of reconciliation and memory within one of the darkest times in human history in one of Europe’s largest former […]
By Kelsey Klimara After traveling for 20 days and to seven different cities, my favorite place is still the first. Vilnius, Lithuania has been the most impactful and memorable city thus far due to the history that is embedded within the city walls and due to the past that has been suppressed and forcibly forgotten. […]
By: Tory Russo For me, the easiest way to understand is through experience. This makes learning about the Holocaust particularly difficult because I have fortunately never been and hopefully never have to endure such a terrible time period. It’s impossible to imagine, let alone compare to my own life, the conditions that the Jews and […]
By: Jake “Andy” Fabrizio Imagine the shock and outrage if a cohort of eleven students was ruthlessly slaughtered as the result of a sick ideological platform. The public would not be silenced. Now imagine this happening about two hundred thirty six times over to similarly innocent people with no one to stop it. There you […]